


C*NT Associates

by wishwellingtons



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-31
Updated: 2013-05-31
Packaged: 2017-12-13 14:12:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/825207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Inquiry, Malcolm Tucker is convicted and sent to prison. After ignoring all correspondence, he hears from Jamie's half-brother that Jamie's family needs help. </p><p>"Even if it’s the Dignitas of prisons, the slow-mo hospicesque faux-country hellhole reserved for disgraced Tories and gentlemen cons, and even if he’s effectively repelled anyone who might think of rubbing their flobbery crypto-fascist wilt-dick against any part of his cadaverous anatomy, Malcolm finds incarceration both frightening and dull."</p>
            </blockquote>





	C*NT Associates

Even if it’s the Dignitas of prisons, the slow-mo hospicesque faux-country hellhole reserved for disgraced Tories and gentlemen cons, and even if he’s effectively repelled anyone who might think of rubbing their flobbery crypto-fascist wilt-dick against any part of his cadaverous anatomy, Malcolm finds incarceration both frightening and dull. He’s let it be disseminated (a dangerous word, he’s pretty fuckin’ sure that in a nastier if less mind-numbing place, he’d be being disseminated himself, daily, in the showers) that he’s writing his memoirs, and since nobody’s ever allowed inside his cell, the rumour is believed. The thought of Malcolm Tucker, nothing left to lose, finally opening a vein onto paper is appalling enough to mobilise quite a substantial campaign for his appeal, with a lot of jolly nice and jolly bent whips and donors making unexpected phonecalls to Sam to ask where, exactly, they should send their contribution. 

There’s no possibility of Malcolm’s sister visiting, since he’d rather cut off his own dick than see a woman from his family in this place, and he doesn’t post any other visiting orders. Nor does he reply to any letters, except those from Sam (he eats every fucking biscuit Julius sends, though he rips up the polite, coded letters all of which imply the shiny scrotum’s found a way to get even richer now Malcolm’s off the scene). Nor does Malcolm acknowledge, then or later, the hours he spends closeted with the rolling news, wishing death and destruction upon Oliver Francis Reeder, who’s busy fucking media and communications into deadly, incompetent silence. The man is already on his second wife, after eighteen months in the job. Malcolm gnashes in the white glow of his cell TV and imagines how best to tear Reeder apart, from hairline to hangnail. Malcolm’s the sort of man who’s had an ‘I will kill again’ face since he was twelve years old, and it’s seen at its best as he curls on what passes for a bed and snarls at News 24. 

The person Malcolm wants to see least in all the world is Jamie. He has heard notions – gossip – unplaceable and infernal crap, carried perhaps in the aircon or in the senile drip from a defrocked bishop’s nostril – that the demented pitbull dragged his lopsided bollocks and his ASBO back to Scotland, possibly to an Edinburgh newspaper Fuckwitted arseholes who’d never be privy to Jamie’s movements claim the whole family’s gone across the Atlantic. 

All Malcolm felt when he heard this was boredom (and anyway, he fucking doubted it, because he’s still paying school fees for Jamie’s tiny papist daughters). This boredom was the natural continuation of the total indifference he’d felt when Jamie had failed to show his unwanted face at any day of the Inquiry; a complete lack of fuck-giving that had first begun when it was confirmed that Jamie hadn’t shat a syllable of statement onto the glass coffee-tables of waiting hacks; that Jamie didn’t respond, by look, word or fucking deed (fucking _indeed_ , Malcolm’s brain supplied in Jamie’s voice, which was two parts amusing to nine hundred parts catastrophic, pass him the stun gun) to the arrest and disgrace of the man who’d dragged him, single-handedly, from halfway up a canon’s cassock to the kingdom and the glory that was politics. 

Malcolm feels nothing about Jamie’s silence or absence. He never wants to see the trigger-happy toejam again while they’re both still breathing (and he’ll thank Jamie’s God, should he exist, if He assigns them separate clouds in the afterlife) and he doesn’t care what’s happened to him. Which is precisely why Malcolm’s palms get wet and his mouth goes dry the morning he receives a letter from Paddy, the least criminal and best-looking of Jamie’s feral collection of half-brothers. He hasn’t seen Paddy since Jamie’s mam’s funeral, and – before that – not since Jamie’s own wedding, both hideous occasions, and both (if Malcolm remembers it fucking correctly which, despite recent insinuations regarding the accuracy of his memory, he’s pretty fucking sure he does) largely bankrolled by Malcolm himself.

Like Jamie, Paddy’s handwriting looks as if he was trying to kill the pen, rather than write with it. He begins the letter by announcing he’s worried about Jamie. Malcolm doesn’t sweat, in common with a number of other bodily functions he forfeited years ago, all of which are contributing to the earth-shaking coronary slowly rolling towards him like the opening sequence of _Prisoner_. Nevertheless, something cold and semi-vapourised has formed in the place where the back of his neck should be (if Malcolm were conscious of any movement or sensation is the now entirely constricted boulder zone that joins his emaciated shoulders to his steel-grey head). Paddy doesn’t elaborate on why, exactly, he’s worried, but reaffirms that he is, several times, in lurching capitals, before seizing on a secondary idea: that he’s worried about Mag. 

Mag is Maggie, so christened for Jamie’s mother and not for late lamented Dame Fascist Hellbitch, as Jamie has more than once (as Malcolm once also) affirmed with his fists. Maggie is Jamie’s eldest daughter. She is intelligent, cunning and beautiful, and thus nothing like her father in any way. Malcolm has been her godfather since approximately the hour of her conception. Paddy’s words are sloppy with sincerity, but let’s just say that if anyone – anyone – were anxious to secure an interview with Malcolm regarding the family business of one Jamie Feardorcha Andrew Ignatius Macdonald (Catholic overnaming was a proud Macdonald family tradition), fabricating an emergency around the marmoset-eyed person of Maggie Teresa Clare Francesca Macdonald (a proud tradition which Jamie had fuckin’ well _continued_ ) would be both cruel and highly effective. 

Malcolm frisks a former Shadow Chancellor for his phonecard (at its best, prison is very like a fantasy child-Malcolm had about being let loose in Eton and bullying all the toffs for their lunch money) and gets to the phones. Since he wouldn’t trust any of Jamie’s brethren to have connected phonelines, and since Paddy, the stupid fuck, didn’t think to include one anyway (jesus, he’s probably in some Motherwell squat, is that where Jamie is, has something actually fuckin’ happened with the children), Malcolm dials Sam. She’s no longer his PA, of course – she has another employer, and a busy one, whose identity Malcolm prefers not to know because then he’ll have to take a Prison 101 course in anthrax. 

Dialling, Malcolm’s already forgotten the letter’s completely unimportant final paragraph, in which Paddy said that Jamie definitely definitely wouldn’t want Malc to know any of this, because he specifically (spelt phonetically; both the Macdonald brothers spelt words as if they hated them) said he didn’t want Malcolm’s help and that Malcolm wouldn’t be able to organise sherry for auld wee biddies, never mind a piss-up and – anyway, Malcolm’s forgotten it.

Patrick Macdonald is booked in for a visit a week hence. Malcolm spends the interim writing his fake memoirs and giving a bankrupt fraudster the death ray that (still) constitutes Malcolm Tucker’s Side-Eye. He’s not worried. Sam called twenty-hour fours after his original phone call, to say that as far as she could tell, Maggie was still in school and Jamie wasn’t using the private healthcare Malcolm had set up for her, so there was no need to, er, make huge fucking lumps of cash available/dig it up from wherever we buried it if that’s what it takes to sort out the mess. Hearing Sam quote his own spleen back to him, in her best-polished Roedean-then-St-Hildas was the only part of this situation Malcolm enjoyed. 

The week passes very slowly.

*******************************************************************************  
Patrick Macdonald had always looked the most like Jamie of all the Macdonald halfbrothers. There were eight at the last count. Like Jamie, Paddy was terminally undersized, blue-eyed and as subtle as a heat-seeking missile. Being ginger, he was not, however, Jamie’s fucking identical twin. 

Which made it very, very annoying when Malcolm found in the visitor’s room, wearing a lanyard with MACDONALD, PATRICK KEVIN LACHLAN ALASDAIR, not Patrick Macdonald himself (car thief; father of eight and the only _other_ Macdonald to ever shove his tongue a preternatural distance down Malcolm’s throat), but the aforementioned identical twin of Jamie Macdonald himself. An identical twin with the seething grin of a maniac, and the audacity to sit there swilling prison coffee as if Malcolm might want him to be there, as if Malcolm might be pleased, and as if – and this was perhaps the most offensive thing of all – he, Jamie hadn’t spent every single second of the past two years oscillating between suicidal rage and bored despair, somewhere in that hollow skull of his. 

He looked well, smug, and happy. He even had a light tan, which was a genetic impossibility. Malcolm had been there the day Jamie saw the sun. The sun had won, and Jamie had looked like a tomato for a week, if tomatoes could vomit so extensively they ended up on a saline drip.

“Malcolm.” The devil-runt gave the word twelve hundred syllables and a great warm expanse of well-being. He chewed his gum (around which prison coffee had evidently sloshed, and in the midst of his non-reaction, Malcolm felt a shudder), spread his hands, and grinned up at Malcolm with satisfied bonhomie. Then he extended a hand. “It’s Patrick, don’t you remember me?”

“You little cunt, Jamie,” said Malcolm. It would all have had more bite, if saying Jamie’s name to him hadn’t made Malcolm’s brain bleed a little bit and push glaucoma into the fronts of his eyes. He wanted to follow it up with something impressive, but it occurred to him that he was nine hundred years old, dressed like a shuffling and disgraced con, and that Jamie, who was either a hologram or a cruel joke dreamt up by Dan Miller, had somewhere acquired a suit that didn’t hate him. It fitted. 

Now, Malcolm couldn’t speak at all. Throat cancer, probably. Sudden onset occasioned by the unwanted arrival of his deceitful, lying shitbag of an ex who was prepared to take his wee yin’s name in vain, cite a _bairn_ in order to –

“ – fucking hell, Malc, you look like someone shat in your chest.”

You did, Malcolm wanted to say. Or, second choice, he wanted to beckon one of the fat-bottomed warders leaning against the walls, and tell him: I was stupid enough to put my dick in his mouth. Repeatedly. Then he left me. Temporarily, as it turns out. 

Unfortunately, Malcolm was struggling to breathe. Jamie’s monkey hands were flailing in his general direction, which was a surefire way to get him slung out. Although that was eminently desirable, Malcolm wanted to get his revenge and to obtain the relevant data, he’d have to wait for the crushing in his skull to stop, and for his heart to remember to pump. He evaded Jamie’s grasp and sat down. 

“ – dinnae look so – take that face off y’face, Malc, I had to see you.”

“Why?”

There was a long pause, while Malcolm wheezed inwardly and Jamie gave him a look that said, as far as Malcolm could tell, ‘You’re a senile, incompetent old fool, and I have stopped bumming your political enemies to come and tell you so’. Then, in a manner characteristic neither of Jamie or his halfbrother, or of his three tiny daughters, or of any branch, root, or scrag end of Clan Macdonald with whom Malcolm had ever had the misfortune to deal, Jamie hesitated. He glanced up and down Malcolm’s cadaverous excuse for a greyscale body, and for a nightmarish second Malcolm thought Jamie’s response would have something to do with conjugal rights. Then Jamie tilted his head.

And shrugged. “Your appeal’s going nowhere very fucking fast. We’ll sort that, though. And then you’ll need some decent PR when you get out.” He coloured, minutely, under the ice-age-length stare. And then, because that was Jamie’s way, got very angry very fast.

“I didn’t just lie down in a ditch to die when you fucked me over, pal! I’ve got a fucking job. Cassidy and Nicholson Associates. We’re PR.” He slung a business card across the table. Like most paper associated with Jamie, it was damaged and fraying, with something nasty wadded across one side. 

“Cassidy. As in – “

“Aye. Sam. Sam and now Julius. I’m no’ exactly the _public face_ ,” Jamie conceded, as if this were magnanimous of him, “but I’m on all the paperwork. Sam frightens the shit out of them – you’d be proud,” Malcolm’s eyes glitter in ways that men with sanity should find dangerous, “Julius talks shite until everyone’s mesmerised by his big baldy head, and I go through the bins and fuck over the opposition. Your cheques came in very handy by the way, for startin’ capital. Julius got the girls intae the Oratory’s feeder.”

Malcolm took some time to consider the full implications of this. To give you some idea, civilisations have been destroyed and ice caps become beaches in less time than it took for the coal-black fury to reassemble itself into the approximation of a human’s eyes and face.

Malcolm threw back his head and laughed. The sound would have reminded even the casual fan of horror films of bats leaving a belfry, or coffin lids creaking open to reveal the monster that will eat the young virgin in just under fifty seconds’ time. The way he rested his hands on the table also suggested something of the coffin.

“How’s Maggie, Jamie?”

“Smashing. I’ll bring her next week.”

“You won’t. I willnae have my – “ he swore, and looked down at the card again. “You, Julius, and Sam. Together. In PR.”

“Aye. And you, when you fucking come out. Have to change the name then – others aren’t keen on CNT Associates, although considering it’s exactly – “

There are penalties for striking prison visitors, and this sudden act of violence added a huge blemish to Malcolm’s otherwise splendid record of unadulterated good behaviour. This didn’t matter, however, when lunging across the table to pull Jamie’s eyes out of his skull, garrotte him with his own tongue, and then bash his other available body parts soundly against the Formica, until there was nothing left of Jamie’s madness, voice, or face. 

This was Malcolm’s plan. Instead, there seemed to be a lot of shouting, some pain, and a great deal of blood, not all of it on his knuckles and some of it certainly his own. It took two warders to pull Malcolm off Jamie, and the massed forces of Wings A-F to immobilise and subdue Jamie in return. Jamie, whom in the confusion of getting hands in his hair and hands on his throat and hands all over his treacherous, snake-shedding skin, Malcolm had completely forgotten to call Patrick. The staff were looking unimpressed, and as Jamie pointed out/bawled, THAT would be a very difficult fucking mess indeed for CN Associates to sort out. Impersonating a prison visitor. How were CN Associates meant to save Malcolm Tucker’s fucking life, if Malcolm Tucker insisted on remaining an ungrateful jessie cunt. 

When Malcolm had had his concussion checked and his fist cleaned and two unnecessary stitches forced into his inexplicably _bitten_ -looking lip, he was let back into his cell and started googling. 

CN Associates was apparently no fever dream.

There was no mention of Jamie, certainly. But there was a website, there was a Julius, there was a Samantha and there was a dropdown fuckup Web nine-point-shit floating menu that took Malcolm (if not kicking and screaming, then scratching and sneering) to a page labelled Our Team. Unless Julius were on some sort of diversity-cum-Remploy drive to rehome the laid-off masses of the Gorbals (which in itself was _not possible_ ), there was no good reason to re-employ so many members of Malcolm and Jamie’s all-Caledonian bin-rustling, past-dredging, marriage-frying Communications Team. Flanking them were two or three sleek gits Sam had evidently sourced from Sharks-for-Hire. They looked evil and clever. 

If Malcolm had had a heart instead of a cold, flinty wheezebox, he might have found it all touching.

Malcolm glanced at the calendar on his wall. His appeal was scheduled for four weeks’ hence. He had barely instructed a barrister, let alone any sort of media team. But suddenly he felt quite hopeful. Murderous, but hopeful. It was a familiar combination, last felt when in tandem with the little shit whose skull density had had such painful consequences for his left knuckles, and who – Malcolm touched his scalp with incredulity – had apparently managed to pull out some of his hair. 

Not bored anymore. Not entirely. Malcolm switched off the TV for the first time in days, and eased himself onto his approximation of a bed. His stash of unused visiting orders was on the bedside ledge. He’d probably lose his privileges for a few days, but the governor’s son was once a Parliamentary intern, and if Malcolm no longer had direct access to the jpegs of him in blackface, he was sure the embryo firm of Cunt Associates would rustle them up from somewhere. Doing the thing which passed for a Tucker smile, Malcolm stretched across and reached for a visiting order. He imagined writing Jamie’s name in the space. 

Make the wee psychobilly wait. 

He imagined Julius havering posho-diversity shite to a roomful of guillible cretins. Baron Arnage, putting the cock in cockroach ever since the political holocaust of ’11. He imagined Sam, queen of all she fucking surveyed, reassuring the cretins that only Malcolm could make the bad men go away, with just a hint in her eye that she personally would bring them back again, should the cheques not clear. And Jamie, The Semtex Kid, never knowingly admitted into contact with the public (nobody with a pay-grade above _cleaner_ , anyway), dredging the canals, fisting the bankers, and moonlighting as CNT Associates’ personal Room 101, should the appropriate lines not be very carefully walked.

Malcolm Tucker rolled onto his side and slept the sleep, if not of the just, then the soon to be justified.


End file.
